1: Son Of Saul (15)
(László Nemes, 2015, Hun) 107 mins
This year’s foreign language Oscar-winner, and a film almost too devastating for casual consumption. The subject is the Holocaust, as experienced by a Jewish prisoner assisting the Nazis in the extermination of his fellow inmates – a job as grim and conflicting as it sounds. By keeping tightly focused on his subject (a magnetically stricken Géza Röhrig), Nemes succeeds in communicating a horror too great to capture in its entirety.
2: Captain America: Civil War (12A)
(Anthony & Joe Russo, 2016, US) 147 mins
Plenty of superhero bang for your buck as Marvel orchestrates its own internal bust-up by putting Chris Evans’s Captain and Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man on opposing sides of the UN’s wing-clipping superhero charter, and recruiting a Top Trumps of comic-book characters to fight alongside them.
3: Heaven Knows What (18)
(Ben & Joshua Safdie, 2014, US) 97 mins
From an entirely different rail network to Trainspotting comes a visceral junkie drama centred on a damaged, homeless New York woman (played with conviction by Arielle Holmes, whose biography serves as inspiration for the story) who is addicted to love as much as heroin. It’s a tale told with almost reckless intensity – intimate and unflinching, but artfully made, too.
4: The Jungle Book (PG)
(Jon Favreau, 2016, US) 106 mins
Disney polishes up another of its jewels for a new generation, with uncannily realistic CGI animals and a fresh cast of voice actors to bring them to life (Bill Murray, Idris Elba, Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong’o). The story is a different take on Kipling’s source writings – less the carefree, swinging Mowgli tale of old; more a heartfelt man-cub adventure with an up-to-date eco-conscience.
5: Arabian Nights Volume 2: The Desolate One (15)
(Miguel Gomes, 2015, Por/Fra/Ger/Swi) 132 mins
Part two of Gomes’s epic trilogy, stringing together a series of fantastical fables grounded in Portugal’s current economic plight. This section includes a farcical court case in which everybody is guilty, including a genie and a talking cow. At times playfully absurd, at others it’s poignantly down-to-earth.
